Abstract
Primary healthcare covers a wide range of high-quality preventive care services to the public. With the phenomenon of the ageing population, expenditure spent on healthcare activities is increasing. By improving the primary care structure, the heavy medical burden is expected to be eased to a considerable extent. Therefore, there should be an increasing number of healthcare practitioners providing community-based healthcare to the public as community health practitioners (CHP) and community health coaches (CHC) in Hong Kong. Community health practitioners are trained with the roles in monitoring health behaviours, supporting health promotion activities and strengthening community actions and capabilities to get rid of health risks, thus hel** to reduce the prevalence of chronic diseases, monitor disease progression, improve quality of life as well as reduce the workload of other healthcare professionals to tackle insufficient manpower in primary care. Community health coaches take up a critical role to reinforce citizens with health knowledge to assist them in self-monitoring of health or disease progression and to promote and encourage positive doctor-patient cooperation and healthy behaviours. This chapter presents the development of comprehensive medical services to enhance the continuity of medical services as well as to optimise preventive care to cope with the burden caused by major diseases, ageing population and patients with chronic diseases and explores the continuous development training of community health practitioners and community health coaches by discussing their roles and training guidelines for elderly care in the provision of holistic and humanistic approaches with the aim of ageing with dignity for the older adults.
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Hui, S.H.Y., Ku, E. (2022). Roles and Training of Community Health Practitioners in Elderly Care. In: Law, V.T.S., Fong, B.Y.F. (eds) Ageing with Dignity in Hong Kong and Asia. Quality of Life in Asia, vol 16. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3061-4_23
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